“Here we go again”, said Speaker of the House John Boehner, taking a moment from his his weekly summation of Republican filibusters to ridicule environmental regulations. “The patriotic petroleum industry finds a new way to tap fossil energy and keep America firmly in the 19th century, and here comes the EPA to screw things up.”
He was referring to a recent EPA report that linked underground fracking done to release natural gas, to the sudden emergence of combustible drinking water in areas of Wyoming. “They act like benzene is a bad thing,” said Boehner, “and they go on and on about tremors, brain damage, anemia, cancer, coma, death…..without once mentioning that the average Wyoming citizen’s faucet has just become a gold mine. Think about it, now that the groundwater is flammable it’s much more valuable. Whenever they’re not using it to cook, brush their teeth, take showers or do laundry, they can use it to heat their homes, fill up the gas tanks in their cars and trucks and and fire up the barbecue. Think of all the money they’ll save! I hear you can also use it to strip paint, clean carburetors and make embalming fluid.”
Asked about the dangers to pregnant women and their unborn fetuses, Mr. Boehner called on the assembled members of the media to remember what Governor Rick Perry had said at one of the recent carnival-style presidential debates. “He said that if elected president he would move into the Alamo, criminalize illegal acts and do another thing that I can’t remember right now. Oops.”